Zool

Ported to the Acorn platform in a hail of critical acclaim, Zool never quite lived up to its high expectations. Unashamedly a Sonic clone, it unfortunately fell far below the high quality of Sega's flagship hedgehog games.

As Zool, the Ninja from the Nth Dimension, you battle through several different levels, fighting manic toys, rioting sweets, lethal tools and all manner of fairly imaginative nasties, each level culminating in a boss of some description. You can jump about, climb walls, fire and spin about in a way particularly lethal to the indigenous denizens of the various habitats.

The most strikingly obvious things missing from Zool are backgrounds - there are none! Instead you are subjected to a mind-numbingly tedious single colour backdrop throughout all three stages of a level. The original Amiga version took advantage of that computer's built-in Copper bar hardware to produce boring but at least colourful graduated backgrounds. The Acorn version lacked this. And why!? A Public Domain patch for the game provided this option, and it doesn't even make the game slow down or flicker, so in my opinion the admission of this from the original port is sheer laziness. Whether this is the fault of Cygnus Software, who wrote the Acorn code for Gremlin, or of Gremlin themselves I do not know. I appreciate that Gremlin wanted the cheapest port possible in order to "test the Acorn water", but I personally find that the addition of the coloured backgrounds makes the game far more fun! It also effects a pseudo-parallax since the positions of the colour changes stay constant as the foreground scrolls.

A later 'enhanced' 32-bit version for the Amiga introduced tiled parallax backgrounds. It would have been nice to have this on the Acorn version. I realise that Amigas have blitters but, again, it would have been nice to have, even if only on non-ARM 2 machines.

All that said, the game sprites are large and well drawn, and reasonably colourful considering the game is limited to only 16 colours.

Music

Playability

A nice inclusion are three hidden sideways-scrolling shoot-em-up bonus games, which add a little variety to the game - if you can find them (which is complete luck). Still, once you've found one it does encourage you to keep playing in order to find more. The bonus games are a little lacklustre, unfortunately (not to mention very difficult!).

There are also a multitude of concealed areas in the game, including the odd level warp, to discover (by punching various sections of wall), and there are a few different power-ups which can be collected. All this adds to the playability of the game, but unfortunately it doesn't overcome the ultimately repetitive nature of the game - fundamentally there is very little difference between levels. The game does have some very nice features - I love the pianos which play as you walk over them, and there are loads of things to discover - but somehow it just doesn't work overall.

In Summary

A Sequel?

Review by Gareth Moore, ©1995

Review originally written: 28/1/95

...this page last updated: 26/8/96...
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